Brian Stepanic says he wants The Trevor Project to do better.

Stepanic is an educator based in Columbus, Ohio. He has also been a volunteer counselor at the LGBTQ nonprofit for almost a year. Stepanic is part of the volunteer workforce of The Trevor Project, and they say they are done staying silent.

Last week, the workers’ union of The Trevor Project released a statement against the renowned LGBTQ nonprofit organization. Junior staff and volunteers voiced their concerns over lack of transparency and poor leadership to no success nor a productive conversation with management. In addition, the union remains concerned about The Trevor Project laying off 12% of its staff over the summer.

The Trevor Project is the largest youth crisis nonprofit organization in the U.S. for LGBTQ people. Several hundred volunteers dedicate their time every year running the suicide prevention hotline, with the support of many public figures—from George Takei, to Ellen DeGeneres and even President Obama.

“I always thought—and I still do—the mission of The Trevor Project was very noble and that it was paying it forward to LGBTQ youth,” he said, explaining how he didn’t have resources like it growing up as a young queer person. “It’s getting more traction now with young people, so it’s nice to know that young people who are LGBTQ can go to a safe place to talk through what they’re dealing with.”

The workers’ union call themselves Friends of Trevor United, which started in April of this year. The coalition is made up of The Trevor Project staff and unpaid volunteers, who are trained to de-escalate situations wherein LGBTQ youth are in crisis and risk of committing suicide.

Friends of Trevor United joins the countless unions striking across the U.S. this year—even today, Kaiser Permanente had the largest strike of health workers, not to mention the auto industry’s United Auto Workers’ strike, SAG-AFTRA’s strike for fair compensation and accessible health care, the UPS strike and many more.

Their website says: “Securing a union for The Trevor Project will implement a fail-safe sense of security in ensuring our colleagues are protected, uplifted, respected, and well-cared for. When we work toward creating coalescence between our organization’s mission, and the experiences of our colleagues, only then can we achieve equity in the workplace.”

Friends of Trevor United is also affiliated with Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1180, which is a union for workers in the communications and information industries, as well as the news media, airlines, broadcast and cable TV, public service, health care and more.

Their statement from last week aims to shine light and end what they say is The Trevor Project’s lack of organization and meaningful rapport with its internal members.

“This evening, Trevor management, including interim CEO and co-founder, Peggy Rajski, held a Volunteer Community Meeting to “inform volunteers about important updates.” Despite junior staff urging against it, management took to disabling all chat functionality, effectively preventing volunteers from voicing their concerns and frustrations over the poor leadership decisions,” it read.

According to Stepanic, when Friends of Trevor United voiced their concerns originally, The Trevor Project was open to having a discussion on Zoom. But it quickly grew to be discouraging when he saw the meeting was in webinar mode, where viewers can’t participate in the discussion—and instead only listen. He felt that it only added to the loneliness of volunteering for The Trevor Project.

The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 as a way to provide suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth who are at risk. At the time, 21% of LGBTQ people had made a suicide plan, most of whom attempted suicide before the age of 25. The Trevor Project opened up a space through a toll-free telephone number for crisis intervention and suicide prevention among other modes of care.

Since then, The Trevor Project has grown tremendously, becoming one of the major LGBTQ organizations at the forefront of other nonprofits and receiving corporate partnerships. According to the 2022 Annual Report, The Trevor Project’s annual income was over $67 million.

The hotline is run by its unpaid volunteers who go through rigorous training that spans over several months. Many of the volunteers are part of the recent statement that Friends of Trevor United released, which included the voices of anonymous volunteers.

In the statement, one volunteer said that despite their initial interest in providing care for LGBTQ youth, it has grown increasingly evident that “admins are anything but dedicated to that task. Their continued negligence, lack of accountability, and surface-level initiatives do nothing to address real issues within the organization and make me doubt whether I should continue volunteering at all.”

Another volunteer said in the statement: “You can’t pizza-party your way out of macro issues.”

The day the statement was released, Friends of Trevor United’s shared their concerns on their Instagram page in addition to the website post.

An Instagram user commented, “There is a disconnect between trainers, volunteers and salaried for who work at Trevor. It’s frustrating but I will not give up,” on the post.

Another commenter said, “This made me tear up a little this morning because I felt so alone, stupid, and unsupported in that misnomer of a ‘town hall’ yesterday that talked around the issues and talked at the volunteers.”

Yesterday, Friends of Trevor United released an additional statement that CWA filed a second Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) against the nonprofit for laying off unit members, which they explained directly violated the member’s NLRA Section 8 Rights to unionize.

“We demand the transparency and open communication @TrevorProject leadership claims a commitment to. We demand accountability. We demand answers. We demand fair treatment for ALL workers, especially those who have been hit hardest by these #layoffs. These #layoffs were not only unlawful, but blatantly #retaliatory.”

On July 23, CWA put out a statement refuting The Trevor Project laying off nearly 12% of bargaining unit employees. Friends of Trevor United and CWA were especially perturbed by the fact that the layoffs happened while union representatives were in an active bargaining session with The Trevor Project, not to mention the problems volunteers were already having with training.

“The onboarding as volunteer crisis counselors is completely isolating and alienating,” he said, explaining that his training process took three months. “You don’t have anyone to talk to, you don’t feel like there’s much community built at all, you don’t have a network to connect to, so those were kind of the things we all wanted to hear discussed and addressed by Trevor during that volunteer community meeting. Instead, management just talked at us.”

Even the work of a volunteer counselor can feel isolating for him. When a volunteer takes calls, there is a supervisor that to connect with. But beyond that, volunteers log on, support the youth, log off and speak to no one else.

“It’s very odd, because how it’s run and how management treats it is so anti the mission as well as the work we do with the kids,” Stepanic explained. “The work you do with the youth is very supportive, warm and follows all the frameworks for counseling, but there’s a real disconnect between what we do when we work with kids and what management does with us and what the organization seems to do at its upper levels.”

Many volunteers are at a crisis with The Trevor Project and a “crisis of conscience,” as Stepanic puts it.

“I continue to want to support the youth with whom we connect immensely. At the same time, I really struggled with the lack of listening and the lack of response from management. I struggle to think that I’m going to support an organization that doesn’t seem to support and value me.”

Stepanic has not scheduled any shifts since. Reckon reached out to The Trevor Project for a comment, but by press time had not received a response.